


song request (play me a song to make me smile)

by qthulhu



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King, It Chapter Two (2019)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, F/M, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-IT (2017), Rewrite, Slice of Life, Stanley Uris Lives, Therapy, coming out but not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-27 06:00:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20755484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qthulhu/pseuds/qthulhu
Summary: The ending was terrible.Everyone said it.Bill watches the cursor blink at the end of the sentence. No punctuation, holding the end of the story hostage until he finds how to piece the confetti strands of storylines into a neat, satisfying present.He chews on twisted clippy part of his Sharpie, almost worn enough to break off between his teeth. His fingers run over all the Post-Its sticking out of the pages in the Losers’ copy of the manuscript. Bill folds up Mike’s note in his hand, the little yellow crumpled up thing with 'i don’t like the pacing here' scribbled in slanted, messy cursive. He throws it on the table beside his Scotch. His hand shakes when he picks up the glass and takes a long, burning glug.“Okay,” Bill sighs, setting his trembling fingers to the keys. “Here we go.”The rewrite is due in twenty four hours.----IT the remix, not all of the beats are the same, but the general direction is - The Losers' Club beating the shit out of some fucking clown.





	song request (play me a song to make me smile)

**Author's Note:**

> I FORGOT. TO MAKE IT MULTIPLE CHAPTERS AT FIRS TKJSDGSFDG IM SORRY anyway this is the shit i type when i cant sleep at night teehee enjoy

_ The ending was terrible _.

Everyone said it. 

Bill watches the cursor blink at the end of the sentence. No punctuation, holding the end of the story hostage until he finds how to piece the confetti strands of storylines into a neat, satisfying present.

Bev found it depressing, heartbreaking like a hammer beating down on a crystal glass cookie jar. Why did any of them have to die? Hadn’t the leads been through enough - childhood trauma, loss of family and friends, all the abuse day in and day out - without tragic final destinations determined by a capricious author? The suicide, in particular, came abruptly enough to startle her from the reverie in which she’d drowned between the stanzas. 

She should get it. Life doesn’t have a certain threshold of suffering for each person to reach, to throw its hands up and step back. It beats the living shit out of you.

Richie said the same. He asked about the messages on the walls. Asked why he bothered including the pining if it was gonna end like _ that _. Surprising, Tozier of all of them being the most invested in that subplot - until he followed the statement with “that’s not the kind of screwed I like following a good romance, Billiam.”

He chews on twisted clippy part of his Sharpie, almost worn enough to break off between his teeth. His fingers run over all the Post-Its sticking out of the pages in the Losers’ copy of the manuscript.

Ben hated the swiftness - the lack of true resolution. Like a candle lost in the rain. Eddie loved the cheesiness of it all, but hated the dialogue.

Bill folds up Mike’s note in his hand, the little yellow crumpled up thing with _ i don’t like the pacing here _scribbled in slanted, messy cursive. He throws it on the table beside his Scotch. His hand shakes when he picks up the glass and takes a long, burning glug.

“Okay,” Bill sighs, setting his trembling fingers to the keys. “Here we go.”

The rewrite is due in twenty four hours. 

\----

The walk home is anti-climatic. Ben and Bev swerve into each other a few times, whispering behind their scuffed hands. They barely watch where their feet land, just enough to keep from falling all over each other when they erupt into shy giggles. 

Bill glances over his shoulder and almost runs Silver into a mailbox. He steers out of the way just in time, but Richie catches him. He twitches his eyebrows in a rolling wave, back at the pair, mentally daring him to make a comment. Stan shakes his head. 

“So you guys are fucking now?” Richie says. Ben flushes.

“Why, do you want to watch?” Bev shoots back. Her chin is firm, but she’s smiling. 

“Nah,” he mutters back. “I get enough freak-on-freak action with Eddie’s mom.”

“Seriously, dude?” Eddie grumbles. 

“I bet you guys turn the lights off just like her,” Richie snorts. Ben the tomato boy stares at the crack in the right lens of Richie’s glasses, as if imagining himself shattering the fucking thing with a single punch. “You know, this is a sex positive family. Do you guys need protection?”

Bev gently smacks the back of his head.

\----

Stanley picks at the scabs on his cheeks. It itches, it itches so bad. It’s probably infected. His mom blots antiseptic on the marks and scolds him for staying out with _ those goyim _again, the weird ones that don’t know when to stop. The ones who fill him with enough courage to drop the mic at his bar mitzvah and storm out of the building. A courage born of love and respect; a courage shaken momentarily by the physical evidence of their fragile bond that literally burns with every single brush of a cotton swab.

His eyes shut tighter than Eddie’s gym shorts (yes he noticed, and if he didn’t, Richie’s off-color jokes about how wonderfully it accents Eddie’s ass and vagina draw enough attention to them). He inhales through his nose and pushes out air and stress through his mouth.

The toilet seat digs uncomfortably into Stanley’s tailbone. He shifts, peeks with one eye and catches himself in the mirror, the vibrant crimson framing his cheeks turning him an alarming shade of white.

His mother brings a glass of water and ibuprofen for the pain. She puts cotton other the top of a dark brown bottle and shakes. It hurts when she wipes away the blood; it hurts when he swallows and the pill lodges in his gullet.

“Thanks, Mom,” he coughs. His face looks better; the Losers are probably all at home now too, getting patched up by their respective parents. Eddie especially. His mom probably cried with relief. He wonders if she’ll let him out of the house at all this summer.

“You’ve got to find better friends, Stanley. One who will treat you kinder,” Stan’s mom sighs.

Stan kicks his feet. He doesn’t know what to say.

It wasn’t their fault. Even if it feels like it. Even if his chest hurts when he stares at the dark corners of the massive unlit living room for too long. He picks at a scab. His mother bats his hand away.

“Stop that, it’ll scar,” she scolds.

“Can I spend the night at Richie’s next weekend?” he asks, ignoring both of her comments. Her hand stills. She blinks, squints at him and seizing his nerve up. Her face is worn. Up close, he can see all the little wrinkles around her lips from frowning. He wishes she’d smile more.

“He’s the one with the glasses, yes?”

“Yeah.”

“‘Garbagemouth’?”

“‘Trashmouth’, mom. We call him Trashmouth because he talks a lot of trash - says a lot of stuff he doesn’t mean.”

“Why?”

“To be funny, I guess,” Stan shrugs. “He’s funny.”

“If you want to stay the night, I can’t stop you,” she says. “Apparently, you come and go as you please now.”

Stan keeps his eyes on the tiles. The bathroom is two feet smaller in every direction. 

“I’ll call when I get there, promise.”

\----

Eddie Kaspbrak was six years old when his mom took him to his first specialist. If you knew Eddie’s mom, you’d find her patience on the matter godly. 

Sonia Kaspbrak was a bulky woman built of steel will and separation anxiety. Every day was something new; _ watch out for cracks in the sidewalk Eddie, don’t play at the quarry Eddie the water is filthy there’s fish feces in it, wear your face mask Eddie your asthma can’t take the pollen today; _ every day was a battle with outside bacteria attempting to snatch her little boy from her arms. Eddie could put in sutures and take them out just because she’d wanted him to be prepared _ just in case _he crashed his bike. He keeps a needle and thread and a box of bandages in his fanny pack, and anti-bacterial wipes in the smaller pouch nested in that. He prides himself in his vigilance. Mom handed him the tools of medicine and gave him years to perfect his methods.

Maybe it had something to do with the letters she tore up from the hospital every morning, the one’s with dad’s name on them.

Or maybe it’s the papers tucked in the drawer by dad’s urn, and the way her eyes linger on the ring placed on a hankey in front of the silver. Whatever it is, she took those frayed medical bills and shaped him into a careful creature of survival, ready for the worst.

So when Eddie, thirteen with years and years of medical care below his belt and arm already wrapped in a neat plaster glove, stumbles into the house head-to-toe in black vomit and smelling like the depths of a dumpster, his mother snaps. She chases him around the house, right into the bathroom. His knuckles scream around the door knob as it slams shut. He fumbles with the latch.

“Mommy, stop!”

She hits the door to no avail.

It’s locked.

The pounding of her pudgy fists shakes dust off the dingy bathroom walls.

Eddie strips out of the disgusting grimy clothes and throws them into a pile by the toilet. It fucking smells. He can smell the grey water on him, his lymph nodes absorbing the shit and piss like sponges and oozing dense sweat riper than gym socks. His cheeks still ache from frowning and laughing and screaming. The blood in his veins run ice cold.

He should’ve stopped at Richie’s for a shower. 

His hands tremble. He juggles his no-tears anti-dandruff shampoo and conditioner set against his chest while he pulls the shower curtain shut. The bottles line the tub’s edge. He doesn’t bother wrapping the cast in a plastic bag like the doctor told him too - it’s already drenched. Might as well clean it with the rest of him. His fingers stick out of the greyed gauze like five little hot dogs, limp and utterly useless to grasp the faucet handle.

“Eddie, sweetie, let me in,” Mom says. “I need to check your wounds.”

“I know how to do it!”

Sonia Kaspbrak heaves her hand high above her head and smacks the wood so hard he can hear the hinges creak. He jumps and tugs the water on the hottest temperature their high-pressure showerhead can muster.

“Ouch!” he yelps.

“Eddie!”

Eddie slips to his knees and cries into his good hand.

His mom lays her head against the door long after the sky melts into dull gray.

\----

Beverly doesn’t...go home after the sewers. She sneaks in through the fire escape. Lucky for her, her father is passed out on the couch with a half-emptied beer bottle on the coffee table beside his crossed feet. His face is reflected in a whole case worth of amber glass littered around the room, some bottles on their sides, some shattered against the wall. He smells like piss.

He snores, bats at his nose with the creased side of a polaroid. She sees red. She holds up the iron from Neibolt like a sword. He drops the picture and it folds open.

Bev steps over the smiling face of her mother. She tiptoes down the hall, through the sparkling shards, and stuffs five pairs of clothes, seven pairs of clean underwear and socks, and a fresh pack of cigarettes into her school bag. She stands beside the duvet and runs her fingers over a bloodstain they must’ve missed in their cleaning extravaganza. 

_ Can Daddy see it, _she wonders. She looks back at the scraggly form. Didn’t come home, blood in her bed, no phone call. No wonder he’s in such a state. The urge to kick his knees while he can’t fight back, can’t hold her wrists down and fill her heart heavy with dread while he sniffs her neck, nearly overcomes her.

She can’t stay.

Her eyes wander to the loose piece of wall behind her dresser, the her amber hair falling free from behind her ear as she drops on the bed.

Bev swings the bag over her shoulder, rolls a pillow up in a blanket under her armpit, and crawls out the window. To Ben’s.

The door is unlocked because it’s 1987 and the biggest fear a person has is their child wandering off like one of the others; though it’s a fading memory now, almost buried by the stacks of missing posters dated one week old, the last being Bettie (thank god it’s over). 

Ben waits by the backdoor, though he won’t admit it to Bev if asked. He sits at the small kitchen table in fresh pajamas while his mom brews a pot of coffee since it’s nearing eleven. 

She wasn’t supposed to be awake when he got home, and she had too many concerns to leave it alone. So he told her the Loser’s Club went to Neibolt when Beverly showed up at Bill’s crying because her dad hit her. They fell through the floorboards while playing; that’s why he’s all messed up. That’s why Bev’s coming over. 

Mrs. Hanscom tolerates this so long as Beverly calls her family in the morning. 

The pair sit across from one another, Mrs. Hanscom sipping her mug and Ben just holding a glass of milk, and watch the door until it silently twists and Bev’s disheveled curls peek inside. Her cheeks pinken where they aren’t scraped.

“Hey, Ben. H-hey, Mrs. H,” Beverly stutters, a mimic of Bill’s fluttery speech. She looks at the pillow in her arms and the bag on her back and can’t come up with a convincing lie. Her eyes bulge in Ben’s direction, searching for assistance. 

Mrs. Hanscom stands. Bev flinches and takes a step back. For a second, she watches the woman’s arms rise and feels her throat close up in anticipation, the pads of _ It’s _fingers tight around her. Then she’s enveloped in her loose embrace, shaking as a lifetime of tears erupt from her lungs. Ben stands, too, pats her back and tells her he’s there. Her boots crush the pillow. Mrs H will wash the dirt stains out in the morning when the pair are gone, slitting their palms at the Barrens with the rest of the Losers.

\----

Richie folds his glasses and puts them on his bedside table. He tosses that dead kid’s bat under his bed like a stack of his mom’s old Playgirls (secretive. bad. not for anyone’s eyes but his own).

His parents’ room is right next door; they’re asleep, just like they were when he left. They probably didn’t even notice he was gone. They might not have noticed if he didn’t come home. 

Apparently forty hour weeks can knock a motherfucker out for hours. He scoops a mouthful of peanut butter straight out of the jar and takes a bite of bread. A deconstructed sandwich, a snack born of laziness. Richie’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. He plucks a glop of dry-bread-peanut-butter-slop from his teeth and rubs it on his shorts.

The missing poster, the one with his **face** and his **hair** and his **clothes** and his **birthday** in big bold letters, is folded up in his pocket, heavy as a brick. He throws it on the ground and stomps on it like a lit cigarette.

The room is blurry, and it’s not because his glasses are off. He scrubs the tears away with the heels of his hands.

Right about when he thinks about crawling into bed with his mom and dad, do Richie’s feet drag across shaggy brownish-grey carpet and nudge open the door. His mom wraps an arm around his wiry frame and he exhales.

“Another nightmare, kiddo?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Stupid clown again.”

He doesn’t know if he’s talking about It or himself.

\----

Mr. and Mrs. Denbrough wait, stern frowns just barely concealing the rage boiling beneath their skin. Bill loses TV _ and _ phone privileges for a whole week (not that it’ll be enforced for longer than a few days). 

“How could you do something like that?”

“I told you to drop it,” Mr. Denbrough spits. He uncrosses his arms to jab a finger in Bill’s face. “I told you he was gone. You were supposed to let it go.”

Bill scowls, frantic, angry energy surging in his veins. In his mind’s eye, Georgie stumbles toward him, blood dripping from the flopping sleeve of his raincoat. His galoshes squish, and his face is twisted into a needle-sharp toothy grin. 

“I-I can’t forget about G-G-Georgie like you!”

Mrs. Denbrough covers her mouth with her hands as if attempting to capture the gasp that escapes her lips. Her husband’s jaw snaps shut. He glares at Bill, squeezes the bridge of his nose. Bill huffs and huffs.

Then the roaring in his ears crashes into gentle waves. 

It’s over.

He knows, now, Georgie isn’t coming home. 

Dad’s right.

“You were right,” he says as much. “He’s dead.”

Mr. Denbrough wraps an arm around Mrs. Denbrough’s shoulders, comforting where she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t so much as tear up at the news. 

About a week later, police fish Georgie’s mangled arm out of a part of the Barrens that very few of the neighborhood kids stumble upon. He’s not the only one they find, either. They pile enough body parts to piece together a classroom’s worth of kids, none of them all the way puzzled together. When the broadcaster warns the viewers of incoming graphic depictions, the decapitated children stare straight into the lens with creepy gummy little grimaces because all of them are missing their teeth. 

Bill throws up in the waste bin beside his bed.


End file.
